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Should You Leave Google Chrome For the Opera Browser? (vice.com)
mspohr shares a report written by Jason Koebler via Motherboard who makes the case for why you should break up with Chrome and switch to the Opera browser: Over the last few years, I have grown endlessly frustrated with Chrome's resource management, especially on MacOS. Admittedly, I open too many tabs, but I'd wager that a lot of you do, too. With Chrome, my computer crawls to complete unusability multiple times a day. After one too many times of having to go into Activity Monitor to find that one single Chrome tab is using several gigs of RAM, I decided enough was enough. I switched to Opera, a browser I had previously thought was only for contrarians. This, after previous dalliances with Safari and Firefox left me frustrated. Because Opera is also based on Blink, I almost never run into a website, plugin, script, or video that doesn't work flawlessly on it. In fact, Opera works almost exactly like Chrome, except without the resource hogging that makes me want to throw my computer against a brick wall. This is exactly the point, according to Opera spokesperson Jan Standal: "What we're doing is an optimized version of Chrome," he said. "Web developers optimize most for the browser with the biggest market share, which happens to be Chrome. We benefit from the work of that optimization."
Slashdot reader mspohr adds: "I should note that this has also been my experience. I have a 2010 MacBook, which I was ready to trash since it had become essentially useless, coming to a grinding halt daily. I tried Opera and it's like I have a new computer. I never get the spinning wheel of death. (Also, the built-in ad blocker and VPN are nice.)" What has been your experience with Google Chrome and/or Opera? Do you prefer one over the other?
Slashdot reader mspohr adds: "I should note that this has also been my experience. I have a 2010 MacBook, which I was ready to trash since it had become essentially useless, coming to a grinding halt daily. I tried Opera and it's like I have a new computer. I never get the spinning wheel of death. (Also, the built-in ad blocker and VPN are nice.)" What has been your experience with Google Chrome and/or Opera? Do you prefer one over the other?
Why not? It could hardly be much worse ... could it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Something to do with not enough RAM installed and inability to do anything about it?
the downside to the built in VPN is that many sites outright block it; so while it would be 'nice' -- it's usefulness is somewhat diminished.
Just use The Great Suspender -- idle tab suspending service: https://chrome.google.com/webs...
Because I still use Firefox.
The majority of people who have 10+ tabs open don't need all of them opened at once. Close out the tabs you don't need and use bookmarks if you need a handy reference back to something.
Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.
On a side note: Opera's a great browser, however i'm skeptical of its Chinese ownership. If i'm going to have any intelligence agency know my private details in and out, I prefer it to be the NSA and CIA. /sarcasm
The problem is it shouldn't take over 100MB of RAM to display a webpage. Opened this very /. page in a Chrome incognito window (so no browser extensions in the tab, clean as I can get it) and it settled in at around 140,000 KB of RAM. That is ridiculous.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
My life is boring enough that Google is welcome to my information. What are they going to find out about me? I like sex, pizza, and laziness? I freely admit those things.
For years, no one mentioned Opera except to scoff in passing, but now that it's been bought out, suddenly it's the best thing since sliced bread.
But, thankfully, Opera was forked into Vivaldi for those of us who were concerned about the direction Opera is going/went.
At one point, years ago, I paid US$35 for Opera because it completely rocked -- it was and has been, ahead of the curve for years. Now, I dropped Opera and only run Vivaldi (except I have to use Chrome for some peculiar website shit but that's it Just one site, essentially).
Did I mention this better browser, Vivaldi, by chance?
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
I'm "the guy" who owns a 2010 MacBook Air. I realize that this was never a high performace machine and is now obsolete. I would buy a new Mac but the offerings from Apple are even more pathetic than in 2010.
I had abandoned the machine but dug it out to do my taxes and when the whole "get a VPN" thing happened, I decided to try Opera. I was amazed that the machine was useful again! Instead of endless bouts of soul sucking beach ball spinning, I could just use the machine and it rarely pegged the CPU or filled up the measely 2 Gig memory. It felt like a new computer.
So, if you are suffering from a slow,, memory hogging web browser, I highly recommend Opera.
P.S. If you couldn't tell, I am a cheap old geezer.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
My MacBook was about $1000 and I'm still using it seven years later... so about $150/year.
Before I installed Opera, I retired the MacBook and bought a Chromebook which has much better performance... but it did cost $250.
I now use the Chromebook (Flip) as a tablet... works great. I'll keep using the MacBook until new improved software kills it again.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Bingo!
And this is why devs and beta testers need to be forced to do all their testing on a first-generation Athlon64 with less and 1GB RAM.
Not because they expect their audience to use such a machine, but because their audience will be using their program and a dozen others at the same time.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.
I take it you're unaware that RAM prices are nearly twice what they were at this same time last year?
The fabs for two of the three major manufacturers are currently in the middle of transitioning to smaller manufacturing processes, resulting in the industry being unable to keep up with demand. The fact that the mobile market keeps asking for more and more of their attention doesn't help matters either. As such, prices are actually expected to keep going up until around the end of the year.
If you'd like to see the price tends over the last few years, PCPartPicker has some pretty good charts highlighting the issue. Suffice to say, picking up RAM is not so cheap as you suggest. Maybe next year.
Opera is a great browser. Chrome is also wonderful as is Firefox. Frankly I prefer Firefox with one serious complaint. Right now my Firefox browser will not play sound on You Tube or video or sound on Netflix. That was not an issue until the latest update. Chrome has also gone through releases that would not run NetFlix. I am not aware of how Opera is doing with Netflix lately. I will say that Netflix is a big enough deal that any browser should be able to run it perfectly with zero tweaking.
Agreed. Bach is for true connoisseurs ;-)
Because that page with 'text and a few pictures' actually loads 10 mb of scripts and video players and comments sections and sidebars and headers to surround the text that you actually want to see with useless garbage you don't.
This is why for any site you visit frequently you need to spend 5 minutes going apeshit on it with ublock/abp and its element hider making all the custom filters you need to so absolutely nothing loads *except* the 2kb of text you actually care about. Page download and load times fall to almost literally zero.
(Wait, can you not do all that on an iToy? Well sucks to be you then.)
Over the last few years, I have grown endlessly frustrated with Chrome's resource management,
Sorry..... SECURITY trumps resource management, and Chrome is much more secure than Opera thanks to being miles ahead in process sandboxing.
especially on MacOS. Admittedly, I open too many tabs, but I'd wager that a lot of you do, too.
So stop doing bad things. You've gotten into a lazy habit of holding too many tabs open. Yes, tabs have their place. Their place is not to have 10+ tabs open; if you find yourself opening more than 5 or 6, you need to concentrate efforts on bookmarking things to check back later and close tabs.
I thought Chrome was going to give me a better `browsing experience' than I'd been getting from Firefox which still seems to refuse to work well with the majority of the Javascript it encounters. Alas, Chrome was actually worse than Firefox. Javascript seemed to be less of a problem but memory utilization was through the roof with my 8GB desktop swapping all the time and grinding the whole system to a halt while that was happening. What has made Chrome much better is `The Great Suspender' add-on. It's nothing less than a damned Godsend. Set it up to suspend tabs after five minutes (even pinned tabs) and auto-unsuspend when you switch back to them and waiting for memory swapping is almost a think of the past. The only drawback is that the back button acts oddly when you unsuspend a tab--it'll take you back the `click to unsuspend this tab' screen.
Opera on the other hand... well I've been mainly using Opera for LinkedIn as it seemed to run that site better than most other browsers. I still find that it's a bit of memory pig though I admit that I haven't explored whether there are add-ons that can control this a bit. I haven't bothered to switch to using LI with Chrome. Yet. I might be abandoning Opera if that test goes well.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Oh yeah, le old complaint about Chrome using too much ram...
I mean, go ahead, use Opera and tell us what you think of it. I don't think people should be trapped into using certain browsers only because everyone uses it, seriously.
But the CHROME USES TOO MUCH RAM complaint is pretty stupid and it was several times explained why it behaves this way at this point.
Put simply, resources of your computer that are not used are just that... not used. Having a browser that leaves a whole metric ton of free RAM around benefits no one.
Chrome was a browser developed to take as much advantage of your machine as possible. It's definitely not lightweight, so alternative browsers can be a good thing if your computer is crappy, but how much free ram it leaves behind is a very stupid reason for switching.
Chrome uses separate processes for each and every tab to solve problems with one tab crashing the entire browser. It dynamically allocates as much ram as possible to pre-load stuff and speed up things. Just make a test yourself. Open Chrome, run as many tabs you like, saturate the ram... with a reasonable machine. Then open some other software that chews up ram... like, I dunno, something from Adobe CC. You'll see that even though Chrome was using all the ram, you are still able to open another sofware and use it without problems. That's because Chrome will set the limit of ram usage to a lower threshold.
It's by no means perfect or anything like that, but if you are gonna criticize it, it's better to look a bit more into your complaints before spouting nonsense.
Are there any breakdowns about what browsers do with all that memory? I'd be intrigued to know what they're filling it with.
I've always thought the same, it seems excessive, I understand that they can speed things up by caching, which in turn saves memory, but even here I'm struggling to understand what you could possible cache that would turn a 5mb web page into a 150mb slab of cache - even if you cache all the markup, the scripts, the images, the CSS, and have them in raw form, and displayable form (i.e. the DOM, resized images etc.) I'm still not entirely sure how you end up with so much. Even if you're JIT'ing the scripts and storing the JIT compiled versions it still seems entirely excessive.